Chris Selley: If only these Olympics were the ‘austerity Games’

London Olympics: If only these Olympics were the 'austerity Games'

Two interesting things happened in Spain last week. The first is that the national statistics agency announced the second-quarter unemployment rate: a staggering 24.6% overall, and an almost unfathomable 53.3% for youth. The Spanish economy keeps contracting. The government flails helplessly in debt. Taxes are going up. Services and public sector salaries and jobs are being cut. The banks are being bailed out. There are protests in the streets. It’s one of Europe’s leading basket-cases.

Also last week, the Spanish government announced it would press on with its bid for the 2020 Summer Olympic Games. “We are not talking about huge investments here,” said the country’s State Secretary for Sport, Miguel Cardenal. That’s some cojones, right there. Madrid’s bid boasts that most of the infrastructure required has already been built — in part due to previous failed bids. But every monetary figure involved in the Olympics is “huge.” The bids alone cost tens of millions, a fair portion of which swirls down the gullets of various corpulent delegates from around the world in the form of caviar and fine wine. Playing that game while preaching austerity on the home front is … well, again. Cojones.

The London Olympics, which some have laughably, bafflingly referred to as the “austerity games,” are slated to cost anywhere between $14.7-billion and oh my sweet lorda lot more than that. The opening ceremonies alone cost $42-million. There is no austerity in sight. Mind you, Danny Boyle’s Friday night production cost half of what Beijing’s opening ceremonies cost. And while it was certainly a big, complicated to-do, compared to other recent examples, I thought it was a pleasingly human, almost folksy spectacle and not primarily a technological one. There was singing, dancing, poetry, mythology, symbolism — there was drama. It made you think, not just gape.

Mr. Boyle, who knows something about matching music to drama, took particular delight in throwing the British pop music canon at us in short snippets. Whenever an unexpected favourite was excerpted, people Tweeted their obvious delight. Playing an MP3 in a stadium doesn’t cost much. The stars in attendance were paid £1 each. What if they’d just put on a concert and a parade? Now, Dizzee Rascal. And now, Paul McCartney. And now, reformed once more, it’s Oasis! Would anyone have gone home unhappy? Do we really need to spend all this money to celebrate the human bloody spirit?

Risky and insulting as Madrid’s bid is, it is nice to see a bid claiming that 85% of what it needs already exists. In London, there’s the brand new Olympic Stadium ($850-million), aquatics centre ($426-million) and Velodrome ($166-million). And that’s in one of the biggest cities in the world, which has practically everything already — including a five-year-old Wembley Stadium that can theoretically be used (with extensive modifications and reduced capacity) for athletics. No doubt that idea would have met with censorious frowns from the IOC delegates. But London really did not need another stadium. And Whitehall could surely have put that $850-million to some good use. The Games will be over in a couple of weeks.

If the IOC really did want to embrace some measure of austerity, it should focus on big cities that have consistently been overlooked: New York (never hosted), Toronto (never hosted), Paris (last hosted in 1924) or indeed Madrid (never hosted) — places that have the infrastructure in place, that can gather the world’s athletes and fans together for sports and pin-trading and good cheer but without spending gazillions of dollars on shiny new venues just for the sake of having shiny new venues. And it shouldn’t let cities spend tens of millions of dollars on no-hope bids. It should just tell those cities that they have no hope. But then, that would be one less place the delegate from Corruptistan gets to visit.

Of course there is absolutely no evidence the IOC is interested in this sort of thinking. But this bloated sportocracy only keeps going because cities are willing to let it. And in democracies, at least, the people theoretically have the power to say no. It’s time, at least, for some serious, coordinated pushback. The Olympics are a great event, but the cost is impossible to justify.